Blog 1 – Dr Jo Lewis, Artist & Arts Council YPCE bursary recipient
Image credit: Jo Lewis
Jo Lewis gained a BA in Fine Art in Coventry and an MA in Fine Art sculpture at Birmingham School of Art. She had a studio in London SPACE studios for a number of years where she worked and exhibited, alongside running a 100-seater vegetarian restaurant Heather’s with her partner.
In 2002 Jo moved from London to Co. Leitrim with her partner and young family to renovate an old stone cottage and to live the ‘good life’.
During this time, she gained PhD at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) for her research into Women Artists in Botswana. The thesis is now held in the British Library.
Jo has worked on the BLAST initiative (Bringing Live Art to Schools and Teachers) and has taught in schools all over Sligo. Recently, for these mini-residencies in schools, Jo has chosen to focus on bringing the pupils outside to make art and gain inspiration. Using a local landscape as a background to delve into the ecology of the place through art.
In 2023 Jo was awarded a bursary from the Arts Council Ireland to conduct some research into the interface between art and ecology in school education as a way of engaging children in their environment.
YPCE Bursary – Art and Ecology for Children and Young People
I have been drawn to using natural materials in my own art work for some time now so, when I was given a series of schools to work with on the BLAST initiative, I hoped I could start to use more natural materials in the work we would do in class.
I began by bringing willow whips into the classroom to make structures with. We would use the willow to bend into shapes that we could then cover in tissue paper and paint – these made colourful kite-like sculptures. I also brought in clay and collections of stones and bits of wood to make make their fantasy landscapes with.
The next year I wanted to go further and to engage the pupils more directly in their local landscapes. So, with the support of the schools, I was able to start each residency with a field trip. In 2022-2023 I was resident in three schools next to three very different landscapes: a bog, a beach and a woodland. So, I decided to carry out the same series of workshops with each school, this resulted in an amazing collection of art works depicting a whole range of Co Sligo’s ecology.
During these fieldtrips the children were firstly given the chance to explore and play in the landscape. Then they were asked to create a piece of land art (this had been previously explained in the classroom) so that the play began to become more focused. Then they were invited to concentrate on one aspect of the landscape, a plant, an insect, a bird, a rock and to document it either through drawing, collecting and pressing or photographing.
All of this experience was taken back to the classroom where, using references, we named and labelled the plants/insects/trees birds they had documented. This then went on to inform the follow up ecology-based workshops in the classroom.
At the end of the term, I wanted to take this further and examine the outcomes of these workshops in more detail and find a way of disseminating this knowledge. The Arts Council’s YPCE (Young people children and education) bursary made this possible for me and my following blogs will look a few of the themes that have come out of it.
